My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Your mum hasn’t ever really done “OK”… She generally ranges from “pallbearer” to “Elton John in his heyday” and nothing in between.

The church came in today. They all looked at me like they were sizing me up for my coffin.

… he had other more important things to do. Right now he needed to… drink coffee and… smell other people’s cigarettes and dream about smoking them himself and… eat more sweets. He was a very busy man.

You are still under the tourist illusion that everything in Paris is fragranced like it was manufactured in a perfumery… We learn to live with the scent of pee. No one knows where it comes from. We clean. We sanitise. After that, no one wants to know where it still comes from.

My Review:

This was a fun and cleverly amusing story with an original premise and enticingly quirky and complex characters.   The lively storylines were well-paced, engaging, highly textured, and hit all the feels while alternating between squeezing and warming my heart. Ms. Baggot’s deft storytelling flows smoothly with colorful details that fleshed out each scene and kept me closely implanted within the characters’ periphery. I got to enjoy Paris without the jetlag, long lines, olfactory assault, or calories.

Jess is falling for Sam.
Sam is falling for Jess.
But it seems life will do whatever it takes to make them fall apart.
When Jess and Sam lock eyes at a party, a spark ignites. The spark. But love at first sight isn’t like the movies, especially when Sam’s ex, Victoria, is determined to make their honeymoon period a living hell.
Is love at first sight enough?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

You’re like a cat on a hot tin roof on roller skates. You’re going to break that chair with all your fidgeting.

I’m about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit right now.

It takes a lot to make me mad but I’m like the Incredible Hulk – except without the green and the muscle: when I go, I go. Unfortunately, that usually does end in tears because when I blow, I end up saying a ton of stuff I regret later and then my ire evaporates, leaving me as limp and pathetic as a deflated balloon.

I teach the reception class. It’s like trying to manage meerkats.

… her nose is so stuck up in the air she’s probably sniffing St Peter’s armpits

My Review:

Lucky me, it was my third-time at-bat and hitting another home run with a delightfully amusing Jules Wake book and I finished up even more enamored with her clever wordplay. I am gradually working my way through the dozen books noted on her Goodreads listing, with the remaining nine proudly residing on my TBR. I adore her witty tales and spunky characters – they beguile and engage me while craftily squeezing my heart.

In addition to a satisfying and entertaining read, Ms. Wake has also provided two fun additions to my Brit Words and Phrases list with shufty – a quick look; and grockle – a derogatory term for tourist, I plan to get a lot of mileage out of both.

The Killer’s Girl
(Detective Morgan Brookes #2) 
by Helen Phifer 

‘Mama, wake up.’

The little girl reached for her mother’s face with one pudgy hand. But the eyes stayed closed, and the blood continued to trickle across the floor.

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house. And unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood.

When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over twenty years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match. To Morgan herself.

Faced with the impossible proof that she is somehow connected to this case, Morgan delves deep into the crimes of a killer who stalked the Lake District two decades ago. But distracted by the old case, she misses the signs that he has found a new victim. And when he strikes close to home, Morgan finally realizes that she has been living on borrowed time. To find this killer, it’s clear she must confront the nightmares in her past…

A heart-racing, nerve-wracking crime thriller. Fans of Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott, and Patricia Gibney will be completely gripped.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Despite him being in love with himself, there was no denying his black hair, tanned skin and brown eyes were easy on the eye. It was no wonder women swooned over him, not that she’d ever tell him that; his head was big enough.

If she did agree to come stay at his house, he was going to have to go shopping and clean up. Living alone meant a different takeaway every night and getting the polish out when the dust was too thick to see the image clearly on the TV screen.

I’d rather shit in my hands and clap…

My Review:

Poor Morgan, she seems to attract trouble as fast as my thighs amass cellulite, which apparently is exponential. I am rather new to police procedurals but I am lapping up this series and developing quite a taste for them while enjoying the devious and conniving wordcraft of Helen Phifer, she is a master of misdirection. She kept me guessing while the killer was front and center the whole time. The storylines were intriguing, interestingly detailed, and thrummed with tension. Her characters are more than a bit fractured and weary, yet endearing and oddly compelling. I am besotted and enamored with Declan and hope he will be featured in greater detail in a subsequent installment.

In addition to an absorbing and gripping read, Ms. Phifer has also provided me with the latest addition to my Brit Words and Phrases list with “I’ll be mother,” which Mr. Google tells me means being in charge of the teapot.   Oddly, Mr. Google had no idea what “being father” would mean – I would suspect sneaking off to the pub.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

He knew what his problem was: it came to him each night before he fell asleep and it whispered loudly in his ear. He was lonely, and the loneliness slithered over his life like a cold snake and stole his confidence and made him shiver inside his own skin.

Sylv chuckled. ‘Well he’s a budgie… but he mocks people and he’s a bird, so…’ ‘So?’ Dawnie screwed up her face, thinking. ‘So he’s called Tequila Mockingbird?’

‘I want to be like Bruce and say “Yippee ki-yay” to his arse.’ Vinnie frowned and followed his mother out into the street. For someone of her advanced years, she was walking quite quickly, her elbows jutting out from her body as if she was looking for a fight… Dilly screwed up her eyes so that her face became tough and imperious. ‘Are you feeling lucky, punk? … go ahead and make my day… Any more of this gossip about Billy and you’ll have me to deal with, Malcolm Frost. And you know what will happen if I hear about you bad-mouthing my friend?’ She waggled the finger under his nose, made a firing sound and blew down the nail. ‘I’ll be back.’

It has taken me years to get it to this state of imperfection.

My Review:

I reveled in every well-chosen word of this lively tale. The storylines were astoundingly witty, thoughtfully insightful, tenderly poignant, and laced together with exceedingly clever and vibrant arrangements of words that whisked me into a colorful vortex where I was practically bouncing in my chair with glee while giggle-snorting and smirking throughout perusal.

Each inimitable character was well-honed, multi-layered, oddly peculiar, vastly intriguing, and uniquely dynamic. The primary characters of Dawnie and Billy were seventy-years young and more high-spirited and energetic than most people in their thirties. I adored them. I was also quite taken with the eighty-six-year-old Dilly who enjoyed watching and quoting Bruce Willis films and claimed she was “on the pull” during their 60s disco adventure. Dilly’s story threads often found me cackling.

While brimming with clever levity and remarkably comical, there were also topical and heart-squeezing elements relevant to our world today including PTSD, grief, anxieties, ageism, bigotry, depression, and social bias. Judy Leigh’s delightful storytelling was smooth, flawlessly engaging, and rapturously transportive. Ms. Leigh cunningly plumbed all the feels while keeping me mirthfully entertained and tethered to my kindle and now finds herself with the burden of a rabid new fangirl for life – unless she starts writing about zombies, I despise zombies.

Silent Ridge
(Detective Megan Carpenter #3)
by Gregg Olsen 

Happily This Christmas: A Novel
(Happily Inc #6)
by Susan Mallery 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

His words made her feel a little floaty, which was silly. She was in some serious trouble here— she hadn’t been this flaky even in high school. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to start flipping her hair and saying “like” in every sentence.

Most guys don’t like shopping, which I’ve never understood. All you have to do is pretend you’re hunting. You stalk, you pounce, you strap it to the car and take it home. A total win, but men don’t see it that way.

Wynn did her best to keep her happiness to herself. Being cheerful was one thing, but giddy tended to confuse her employees and frighten the customers.

The whole process is insane and unnatural… The cliché is true. If it were up to men to have babies, the human race would be dead in a generation.

My Review:

While I haven’t read all the books in this series, the ones I have read have been golden. I have thoroughly enjoyed every trip I’ve taken to Happily, Inc. and fervently hope Ms. Mallery never runs out of residents to feature. The main characters in this installment were highly likable, thoughtful, and admirable people I’d like to know and spend more time with. The writing was wittily amusing, smooth, expertly paced, and flowed through my gray matter like a ribbon of film through a movie projector while eliciting sighs, smirks, and contented smiles throughout a highly satisfying perusal.

Alison and David have been engaged for so long that even Alison’s mother has given up asking when, but it’s the second time around for both of them and they’re not in any particular hurry.  That said, Alison is beginning to wonder if living with her has put David off the idea of marriage so when he suggests they set a date she is delighted. But that date is six months away and a lot can happen in six months – especially if you’re Alison!

‘My son’s been arrested, Great-aunt Millie’s fallen in love, my best friend suspects her husband of having an affair, and I still need to lose weight. How on earth can I think about getting married?’

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

When I was eight my New Year resolution was to eat chocolate every day. I was doing quite well until Mum found my secret stash of Kitkats under the bed. She not only told me off for ‘attracting rats’ but ate it herself while I was in school… My mother has a lot to answer for.

‘I couldn’t stand having her in the car with me. I might say something she’d regret.’ ‘You mean you’d regret?’ ‘No, I wouldn’t regret it!’

That’s the trouble having a relationship with a psychiatrist: sometimes I’m not sure if he views me as a lover or a good subject for research.

Nearly got into a fight with the woman doing the weighing. I said her scales must be wrong. She said it’s top of the range and very expensive. I suggested the battery might need changing. She said they’re run off the mains. I said, ‘Hasn’t anyone else mentioned their inaccuracy?’ She said, ‘Perhaps you could consider whether they might be right instead of arguing.’ I could see I was fighting a battle I wasn’t going to win.

‘Why does he always assume it’s my fault?’ I grumbled afterwards to Bev. She shrugged. ‘Experience I expect.’

My Review:

I giggle-snorted with glee as I made my way through this cleverly penned missive, which was packed to the gills with wry and ironic humor, snark, and witty musings and observations. The main character of Alison was an amusing and scatty hot mess and was to be eternally plagued by a narcissistic drama llama for a mother, one Alison was uncomfortable and resentful in being told she resembled. Her friends and family were an unending source of outrageous and humorous material.   This was my first exposure to the delightfully sardonic wit of Liz Hinds and I was an instant fan soon after the first paragraph.